Want to see lib.reviews in your language? Help us translate :-)

Team blog: Developers

From the beginning, one of the things that’s meant to set lib.reviews apart has been language support. Not only can you view the user interface in multiple languages, changing it also lets you write reviews in your language, or translate them. But I’m only bilingual, which is why we have only English and German so far.

You can change that now, by signing up for an account with translatewiki.net, the open source translation community behind the translation of the Wikipedia user interface. If you’re new to translatewiki.net, they ask you to make 20 test translations before they activate your account. This is to get quality translations and discourage spammers. I just timed it; it takes about 5 minutes, and you can use “Try another” to skip through a difficult message.

After your account is approved, visit this page and select your language in the top right to get started (see screenshot, language selector highlighted).

Screenshot of translation process

Run into any problems? Find us on #lib.reviews on irc.freenode.net or #mediawiki-i18n on irc.freenode.net for general issues with translatewiki.net, or tweet to us at @lib_reviews.

Technical background

I wanted us to be on translatewiki.net, because it’s both very successful and has a great existing translator community, and because it’s fully open source, unlike alternatives like Transifex. It’s a bit more DIY though, so we had to sort out some technical issues first. I submitted a couple of patches to the TranslateWiki platform to support the “.” in the project name, and to support the specific syntax for pluralization that our message format uses. These are now merged and the project is available for translation.